Editing Physics engine (section)

=== Scientific engines ===
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One of the first general purpose computers, [[ENIAC]], was used as a very simple type of physics engine. It was used to design ballistics tables to help the United States military estimate where [[artillery]] shells of various mass would land when fired at varying angles and gunpowder charges, also accounting for drift caused by wind. The results were calculated a single time only, and were tabulated into printed tables handed out to the artillery commanders.

Physics engines have been commonly used on supercomputers since the 1980s to perform [[computational fluid dynamics]] modeling, where particles are assigned [[force vector]]s that are combined to show circulation. Due to the requirements of speed and high precision, special computer processors known as [[vector processor]]s were developed to accelerate the calculations. The techniques can be used to model weather patterns in [[weather forecasting]], wind tunnel data for designing air- and watercraft or motor vehicles including racecars, and thermal cooling of computer processors for improving [[heat sink]]s. As with many calculation-laden processes in computing, the accuracy of the simulation is related to the resolution of the simulation and the precision of the calculations; [[butterfly effect|small fluctuations]] not modeled in the simulation can drastically change the predicted results.

Tire manufacturers use physics simulations to examine how new [[tire tread]] types will perform under wet and dry conditions, using new tire materials of varying flexibility and under different levels of weight loading.